A Study of the Context in a Specific Type of Texts: Car Accident Reports

This paper addresses the issue of defining context, and more specifically the different contexts needed for understanding a particular type of texts. The corpus chosen is homogeneous and allows us to determine characteristic properties of the texts from which certain inferences can be drawn by the reader. These characteristic properties come from the real world domain (K-context), the type of events the texts describe (F-context) and the genre of the texts (E-context). Together, these three contexts provide elements for the resolution of anaphoric expressions and for several types of disambiguation. We show in particular that the argumentation aspect of these texts is an essential part of the context and explains some of the inferences that can be drawn.